Foreign Places is conceived as an alternative travel guide, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition. The eight contributing artists were invited by Stefano Faoro, designer of this publication and also a former WIELS resident, to imagine a place for the book page in which their work is invested – whether it is a building, city or series of locations. The final text chapter features ‘A Glossary of Place Names’ by WIELS curator Caroline Dumalin, which emphatically locates the artists’ image sequences, as well as the essay ‘From Beirut to Brussels: Notes on Curating as an Exercise in Attachment’ by guest curator Grégory Castéra, who delivers a personal account of the challenges involved in working abroad and attaching oneself temporarily to a place or a practice.

“I view achitecture as man himself. After all, achitecture is constructed by man. Architecture is a monument to the passion and effort of those who create it. The growth of architecture is derived from the life of its occupants. Considering architecture solely as a machine is cold. As occupants go about their daily lives, their emotions and experiences are stored within the architecture, providing it with warmth and a chance to breathe. As Le Corbusier said, achitecture is a “machine for living.” Man expects to be protected by architecture, whether it be in order to think, to cry, to dance or to sing freely.”

-Excerpt Tamami Iinuma House of Architecture

Published by Post/limArt and designed by Yoshihisa Tanaka, Tamani Iinuma’s House of Architecture presents a photographic approach to the architectural creations by celebrated modernists Le Corbusier and Kunio Mayekawa. Within, Iinuma’s photographs present a visual abstraction of form and subject, where both man as architect and building as structure stand side by side as an interdependent unit in continuous dialogue with its built environ. House of Architecture is an elegant and considered presentation of Iinuma’s imagery, allowing both image and subject further space for engagement within the structural form of the photobook.

The publication includes texts by Thibaut de Ruyter, Yuzuru Tominaga, Tadamoto Oshima and Tamami Iinuma.

For his first exhibition in Portugal, Wolfgang Tillmans (1968, Remscheid, Germany) continues to expand the possibilities for the reception of his oeuvre through a radical repositioning of its multiple dimensions. At Serralves, he pays particular attention to what he describes as his ‘Vertical Landscapes’, photographs of the natural phenomena of light when day meets night, sky meets earth, cloud meets sky. Dating from 1995 until the present, and printed in scales ranging from the standard size of photographic printing paper, to the panoramic expanse of four metres in size, the photographs encapsulate the expressive potential of Tillmans’ highly developed visual formalism, and his engagement with photography as inherently physical as it is immaterial. In their unnerving beauty, produced partially by the camera makers technical advances and partly by the photographer’s insistence on allowing those advances to show, they create a challenge to the canon of visual cool preeminent in today’s visual culture.

The exhibition will be site specific, in its response to the particular architectural context of its presentation in the museum and through the inclusion of new photographic material. It will also allude to ideas of the ‘universal’ through the everywhere-ness of sky and water, in which glimpses of the human body and particular social, natural and architectural situations and places from around the world emerge. Presented as a visual and architectural intervention across 1000 sq metres of the Serralves Museum’s galleries, together with a suite of installations of newly produced video works, the exhibition promises to be an immersive environment of threshold states.

Since establishing his reputation in the youth and club culture of 1990s London, Tillmans has become one of the most influential artists of our time. His continued exploration of photography as a means to communicate reality is one that inspires and moves in its wonder and its intelligence. For Tillmans, reality is not only visual, social, economic and political, it is organic, bodily, and phenomenal, from the bodies of friends and family to the constellations of cities and plants, the celestial galaxies of night skies and the exquisite abstractions created from the impact of light in photographic process itself. If the medium of photography and its processes provide the foundation to Tillmans’ work, his engagement with place, and his choreographic use of space and scale constitute a world, in which images of people and places and object-like registrations of light are part of an interconnected, physical and cosmic whole.

‘Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Verge of Visibility’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, assisted by exhibition curator Paula Fernandes.

A peculiar phenomenon of the Northern Italian city Merano is its large population of palm trees. The majority of the Merano palm trees belong to the species Trachycarpus fortunei, which was brought to Europe from East Asia in the 1830s. The first palms were planted in the city around 1880 as Merano was transforming into a health resort and a tourist destination. With her artists’ book Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond, Nanna Debois Buhl seeks to trace the palm trees’ botanical trajectories and symbolic dimensions.
The publication presents Buhl’s research through a collection of materials including conversations with the Merano-based botanist Otto Huber, the design scholar specialized in wallpapers Joanna Banham, and the architect Susanne Stacher specialized in alpine architecture, as well as photos and photograms by the artist, old postcards and touristic posters of Merano, historical and scientific images of palm trees. Through this manifold material, the publication unfolds the “cultural biography” of the palm tree in Merano and elaborates on the incorporation of this exotic element in 19th century design and garden culture in the region and on a larger scale, also creating a link to utopian alpine architecture and its relation to landscape.

Published on the occasion of the public art exhibition Art & Nature 2016 Walking With Senses, Merano Spring Festival, Merano, Italy, March 24 – June 5, 2016 Curated by BAU.

Nanna Debois Buhl is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. Her practice is a continuous investigation of historical and cultural knowledge through botany, animal life, imagery, and architectural components. She participated in The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York (2008-09), and received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2006). Her installations and films have been exhibited widely, recently at Pérez Art Museum, FL; SculptureCenter, NY; Art in General, NY; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; Kunsthallen Brandts; Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde; and Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

In celebration of its 30th issue, 032c and artist-director RALF SCHMERBERG teamed up to create “An Innocent Mind Has No Fear,” a proposal for the ultimate Berlin film with a libretto by writer HELENE HEGEMANN. It is a manifesto about life in the post-contemporary era, where cultural promiscuity has dissolved into a condition of spiritual bankruptcy. Heat and compression have melted the meaning from our past algorithms, while aimless citizens wander in search of a new morality. The bandwidth of pleasure-pain has become endless.

Welcome to 032c Issue XXX!

Artist STERLING RUBY shares his archive of workwear, a collection of clothing that appears as next century’s post-apocalyptic craft. Developed initially as a uniform for his Los Angeles studio, the garments are part of a larger, self-cannibalizing material practice that includes his sculptures and paintings.

Austerity bully, refugee haven, neither, or both? — In light of Germany’s newfound powerful and complex role on the world stage, journalist Joachim Bessing and sociologist Heinz Bude seek to untangle the psyche of a country through its mysterious figurehead leader, ANGELA MERKEL.

In the wake of Hood By Air’s sexually charged takeover of the shop windows at Barneys New York, creative directors SHAYNE OLIVER (HBA), DENNIS FREEDMAN (Barneys), and BABAK RADBOY (Telfar) discuss public transportation, dermatology, and the legacy of Helmut Lang over martini glasses filled with ceviche. Meanwhile, writer HANNAH BLACK unpacks the significance of Hood By Air’s silicone replicas of male models into a pyramid of fashion-commodity-death.

THE LOTTA-DELPHINE COMPLEX — At a time when industry wisdom is crowd-sourced and the consumer holds more power than ever before, 032c’s Jina Khayyer speaks to LVMH executive DELPHINE ARNAULT and mega-stylist LOTTA VOLKOVA, two equal yet opposite centers of gravity in the contemporary fashion landscape.

In tandem with his friends Jeff Koons, Jeffrey Deitch, and Maurizio Cattelan, the Cypriot industrialist and art collector DAKIS JOANNOU has turned an “unreasonable love for art” into a Zeitgeist-shaping pile of acquisitions. 032c’s Thom Bettridge travels to Greece at the apex of the financial crisis to uncover the mysteries behind the tinted windows of Joannou’s pop art battleship, Guilty.

“People, for me, are function. Is that awful?” — After being awarded Britain’s best mens- and womenswear designer in the same year, J.W. ANDERSON receives a visit from architect Jack Self, who administers a personality test at the designer’s home in London The verdict: Anderson is an accomplished devil’s advocate and a hyper-capitalist par excellence. Anderson explains why he prefers interviews to psychotherapy, and how the fashion industry is an autobahn: You can go as fast as you like, as long as you don’t take your hands off the wheel.

“It seems like the only way out is to speed up what is already at work”— Anthropologist JASON PINE shares his field research into homemade meth-cooking in rural Missouri and explains how a backwater drug epidemic is in fact the chemical embodiment of mainstream capitalism.

After bringing art criticism to the masses with Ways of Seeing, author and artist JOHN BERGER gave half of his 1972 Booker Prize money to the Black Panthers and used the other half to relocate to a village in the French Alps. Writer Niklas Maak brings us a portrait of Berger’s life as a rural futurist on the occasion of The Seasons in Quincy, a film initiated by his longtime friend Tilda Swinton.

COLLIER SCHORR and LOTTA VOLKOVA team up for an editorial feature, while enigmatic fashion designer CHRISTOPHE DECARNIN makes his debut as a fashion photographer in a celebration of the American West.

Juergen Teller makes peace with a soccer rival, a Renaissance accountant predicts the future of menswear, and the anti-aging industry performs a Swiss Air First Class takeover of the Bauhaus tradition — all this and more in SELECT, a 32-page bonanza of our favorite products of the season.

032c Issue 30 is available now, with a choice of two covers: COLLIER SCHORR shooting Gosha Rubchinskiy and Balanciaga on the left, and RALF SCHMERBERG shooting Gucci on the right.

When considering the art field as being a raft in speculative time, the tendency is to seek comfort in numbers, regressive ideas such as another return to painting[1] or hedging bets on all sides whilst pursuing an unreasonable personal growth fetish.

These are classic reactions to a perceived risk that arises as a result of readjusting to new data. Uncertainty, if left unmediated, will pose a risk not just to market stability but to conceptual stability as it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate between artists and ads; artworks and hype-objects; or content and sponsored content – keeping us in a state of high drama too complex to decode. For example artists who consciously use marketing strategies as art are contextually mixed up with masses of artists who simply run a marketing strategy. Or, equally, galleries with a reputation for long-term quality regularly use their weight to inflate very short-lived speculative art. It is in these differences that art barters itself off very quickly to sometimes uninteresting effects holding us in a certain inappropriate narrative if we are not careful.

Up until a hundred years ago, it was normal to assume that all art aimed at “beauty” or varying degrees of “representation” and that anything but, would not be considered art. Later, after The Fountain, this evolved into the politics of mass production leading to whatever fallacy that we have today – perhaps a speculative bias targeted at an erroneously projected future consensus. It may be worth considering ditching all retroactive rhetoric about “safe places” in favor of heightening one’s own form of perception (perhaps even through enhancement), to adapt to the new environment and to filter through informational debris.